The base game of Kingdom Legacy, Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom, has been one of my favourite solo experiences of 2024. As a small package of 140 card deck and some stickers, it is affordable yet packs a mighty punch. In 3-4 hours, you’ll build your kingdom from untouched grasslands to castles with knights, astronomers and merchants, mines and monsters. It’s a play-it-once legacy system where you use cards to produce resources and use those resources to upgrade cards by rotating and flipping them. Each turn is rather simple: draw more cards or trigger that one effect that will do something great but discard everything on your hand. While more and more enemies are added to the deck you’ll be rushing through over and over again, the real enemy is time. How to upgrade, explore, and influence cards so that when time is up, you have created the most valuable kingdom you can.
Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom already came with 2 mini-expansions in the box, basically small “range extenders” that offer four more rounds each, and there were two booster-pack-sized expansions that had a few more cards but basically weren’t much more complex than that. With Distant Lands though, the first big expansions has been released, featuring a whopping 160 all new cards, a new sticker sheet, and a glimpse of how the many other expansions planned for the future might help keep this one-time-play game alive for a long time.
Disclaimer: I’ll try to avoid spoilers as in specific cards but will talk about the general arc of the expansion, the narrative structure, theme, and a few new mechanisms such as how the legacy mechanism has evolved. If you still prefer to go in completely cold, here is the conclusion in a nutshell: if you liked Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom, this is a must-buy. Skip on the booster expansions and get this instead. It improves on the narrative element and features a few new types of cards and tweaks, but the rule system stays the same in such a drastic way that there isn’t even a new sheet of rules in the box. There are aspects of colonialism in this that I would have wished had been avoided, but it is on the abstract level of “trade with the natives or combat them”. Overall, you’ll get a good 4-5h of new gameplay out of the expansion that feels similar to the mixture of exploration, upgrades, and wonder found in the base game.
Where We Left Off Last Time
If you have completed Kingdom Legacy the base game, you will have ended up with your very own kingdom, a set of cards in various states of upgrading and stickering. While some people (like me) prefer to do multiple playthroughs to be able to explore more of what’s in the box, the general concept is to do a single pass, apply stickers, cross off things on cards, fill in names on cards, and so on. If you want to do another run, buy a new box.
If you played any of the previous expansions, you will basically have done more of the same and your kingdom will have a few more cards. It is not necessary to have played either the mini-expansions or the booster-pack expansions to start playing Distant Lands. You just need a kingdom that has completed the base game.
The New Narrative Arc
As in the base game, the first 20 cards of Distant Lands act as an intro / ramp up phase. We are about to build a fleet and set off into the distant lands in an attempt to extend our kingdom. We get instructions to gather provisions and build ships, the more the better. Right from the get go, there is time pressure and one has to really focus on solving the demands at hand and withstand the temptation of continuing upgrading the various cards in one’s kingdom. The clock is ticking.
At a certain point, the newly built fleet takes off, causing the player to leave a lot of their kingdom behind (can’t pack a wheat field on a boat, can you?) which smartly solves a problem: the longer one plays Kingdom Legacy, the larger one’s deck gets and the longer each individual round takes. If Distant Lands would have continued with business as usual, getting through the expansion would have taken not hours but days and the new cards would have gotten lost in all the old content that would have gotten maxed out at some point. Instead, Distant Lands throws players back into a situation similar to where they left off after the tutorial phase of the base game by setting most cards aside. This is a very nice solution, because one is able to carry over some of the upgrading and stickering earned while playing the base game without bogging down the gameplay. Think going on a journey with some familiar faces.
The rest of the expansion content is again split into the “timer” deck (this time 90 cards) you will inevitably discover and merge into your active deck and the optional content (the remaining 70 cards) you might or might not get based on what upgrades you make and actions you take. One thing that becomes noticeable rather quickly is that there are now more cards with text in the mix that carry the story and some points even allow for some minor branching. Don’t expect any grand narrative, but it is nice that we are now playing more of an explicit story than the implicit one players had to construct in their heads based on the cards they saw in the base game.
In broad strokes, the game can be split into three acts: building the fleet, crossing the seas, and then establishing your kingdom on the new shore. I was surprised to see that the crossing part is more than a brief intermezzo to explain the reset of the deck but in fact turned out to be my favourite part of the expansions. The story and cards are evocative, people on board suffer and struggle, things go wrong. My highlight was when something went wrong, it by chance hit the single most important individual I had in my crew at that point. I was on the verge of losing them, barely able to scrap together what I needed to remedy the situation before the deck ran out. If I would be allowed to user spoilers, I could actually tell this like a gripping short story because it made total sense that this would happen in the moment. It was a random combination of cards that culminated in this, but it was great that something like this could happen!
In contrast, the actual part of the expansion that plays on the new shores was almost mundane and more standard fare like in the base game, including the unsatisfying “score the most points” conclusion. But in that first and middle act, the system truly sang.
New Mechanisms
As I wrote in the beginning, there are basically no new rules to learn, only new interpretations and tweaks of the base game rules that you’ll learn as they come along. There is now way more writing on cards (as in crossing off stuff) than in the base game, but I was still able to proxy it by using small post-it notes to preserve replayability. A new element is that some very, very few cards have an “awaiting sicker here” box printed on them, actually adding a new functionality to the card. I found this in particular interesting during the dangerous crossing of the seas as I didn’t know why I should hang on to certain people or not. The game was just teasing me and saying “this person can’t do squat right now, but there might be something coming …”. Again, a new thing that shows what potential this game system might still hold in the future.
There are other elements of “do this now to potentially get something unknown later”, usually in the form of resource gathering, which was used in interesting ways I won’t spoil here. In general, I would sum it up as: if you know the base game, Distant Lands will feel very familiar to you (e.g. enemies creep into your deck, some cards need multiple upgrade steps, a few A-or-B choices to make, etc).
Conclusion
I’d love to go into more details here and discuss in particular all the potential for more explicit story telling in the system of Kingdom Legacy that this expansion shows is clearly there. There are also some slight variations of the mechanisms seen in the base game that just felt very thematically appropriate here. But going into details would definitely spoil too much. Don’t expect a big complex story or much writing to happen, but there are sprinkles here and there that in combination with the card effects helped to create this very real feeling of a dangerous crossing. Don’t get me wrong: Kingdom Legacy is still very much a game about scoring points and making your engine more efficient, more than it tries to tell a story. But it’s nice that it manages to hold me in its grip and make me want to see if my crew will make it.
I very much enjoyed this expansion. It took me 4-5 plays of the base game to have seen most of the different major paths and options in it, and the situation feels similar here. Once I was done with Distant Lands, there were still ~40 expansions cards remaining I hadn’t even seen yet. So more than enough reason to reset and start again. I’ll likely start with the base game again, just to see if any of my knowledge of what lies ahead will influence the choice I’ll make, but I don’t think it will make that much of a difference. It will just be difference cards I’ll cherish and take on this new journey, not significantly more or less.
As such, my criticisms of Distant Lands are virtually the same as with the base game. The ending is still unsatisfying, as much so that I didn’t even bother to count my score. I know of at least two major mistakes I made during my play and there was one situation where I dropped some cards and wasn’t 100% sure which orientation they should be in. So what’s a score worth if you can’t at least be sure you played all of the tiny timing aspects correctly? I also made a huge mistake when the game told me to put part of my kingdom back in the box. So as a public service announcement: do not re-sort your base game when doing this! When I read the instruction, I mistakingly assumed I could disassemble that part of my deck but what is meant is to take your kingdom and store as-is in the box, keeping your kingdom separate from the already destroyed and never seen cards! This will become important at a later point.
It’s aspects like this (as well as the slightly ambiguous rules in regards to timing) that still make me a big proponent of ignoring the actual scoring but rather setting yourself goals and then seeing if you can achieve them (e.g. this time I want to find the pirates, or get all the horses, or …). I also enjoy exploring different paths too much to play this as a single-play game. The amount of writing and stickering got a bit annoying to proxy in Distant Lands, but it was still manageable. There were one or two cards where I felt they were slightly broken in that it was nigh impossible for me to get them out of the deck once my crew had landed. They felt more appropriate to being culled once the sea crossing part was over, but that wasn’t the case. But maybe I just took the wrong path somewhere and just hadn’t optimised my kingdom enough to be able to get rid of that particular nuisance? Who knows …
My other main criticism is as mentioned before the interaction with the natives, or for that matter that whole framing in the first place. They are represented as a more primitive culture, one pacifies them with booze or destroys them with swords, that just doesn’t feel right to me. There was another situation (in a very abstract way) that amounted to stealing some artifact after cutting through a village of hostiles. Having a colonialistic element like this doesn’t gel with the lovely, inoffensive medieval-slight-fantasy setting of the base game in my opinion. Thankfully, there aren’t topics like slavery or anything that directly on the nose and most people won’t have issues enjoying Distant Lands. But it – in my opinion – would have been better if the distant lands would have been simply uninhabited or there would have been another kingdom on equal footing to the player’s, including a court, politics, merchants, and opposing army.
I can definitely see myself playing base game & Distant Lands a couple more times in the next weeks and irregularly again further down the line. Kingdom Legacy is such a highly enjoyable system of simple decisions that offers you different avenues of exploration in almost every play. I’ll keep playing and will look forward to even more content in the future, even if what I got now already gives me a nice 7-8h of play time for one playthrough. Big thumbs up, great expansion, despite the slightly off tonality. Kingdom Legacy remains one of my biggest recommendations for any solo player right now.